Reagan Was Wrong

Though Fairlie distrusted John F. Kennedy—making a good tory's case that his charisma and outsize promises gave the country false expectations for change—the market worship and hyperindividualism of Reaganism led him to think more warmly of JFK's inaugural. Whatever the excesses of the speech, he wrote in 1986, it had at least treated the American people as citizens, as men and women with a shared stake in the national destiny. A comparable call in the 1980s, Fairlie wrote, would have been: "And so, you fellow Americans, buy your condominium and your Volvo—that's your war effort." In this, he turned out to be more right than he knew. Fifteen years after that essay ran, George W. Bush tried to rally the nation in the wake of the September 11 attacks by telling everybody to go shopping. His failure would have disappointed Fairlie, but it wouldn't have surprised him.

Tax-cutting regulation-haters weren't the only false conservatives in the Reagan coalition, Fairlie argued: the bedroom-snooping, morality--legislating social conservatives were just as misguided. He was no libertarian, but he thought that much of the social agenda of the American political right (then and now) consisted of things that were nobody's business: "Let one homosexual, coke-snorting student bum get hold of two food stamps, and the whole apparatus of government is brought into play," he wrote.

While Fairlie wanted government to be big enough and strong enough to unify society, relieve material want and maintain global order (his defenses of American empire were so forceful and frequent that Sen. J. William Fulbright derided him as "a British Gunga Din"), he had little use for leadership that agitated people needlessly. The history of his homeland gave him a reason to think that government shouldn't meddle in personal affairs: "One may say that the English aristocrat has always been the truest tory because he knows that his own family has survived the most eccentric and often reprobate conduct of its members for centuries."

This question of class plays a crucial part in Fairlie's contempt for American conservatism. Though he wasn't an aristocrat (his father had been a hard-drinking Fleet Street prodigy before him) and genuinely relished spending time with people far removed from the Washington media overclass, he was repelled by the GOP's pandering to the common man. It struck him as vulgar. And it led to his most notorious feud.

During the 1980 Republican convention, he wrote a column for The Washington Post describing the delegates as members of the "booboisie" once mocked by H. L. Mencken, by which Fairlie meant they were: "Narrow minded, book banning, truth censoring, mean spirited; ungenerous, envious, intolerant, afraid; chicken, bullying; trivially moral, falsely patriotic; family cheapening, flag cheapening, God cheapening; the common man, shallow, small, sanctimonious." William F. Buckley replied with a column attacking Fairlie for being an English interloper, a bad grammarian and a snob. When Buckley included the column in an essay collection five years later, Fairlie panned the book in The New Republic, dissing Buckley as unconservative, overexposed and "the quintessential Common Man of our time." This so incensed Buckley that he bought a full-page ad in a subsequent issue of the magazine to reprint his original attack on Fairlie.

When I first read Fairlie's column about the convention, it seemed overheated. Then I watched Sarah Palin speak. Fairlie's disgust at the GOP's impulse toward small-minded demagoguery anticipated the day when it would reach its fullest expression—when the movement would have no farther to fall.